1 Title : Reassignment of the flap allophone in rapid dialect adaptation

In an experiment spanning a week, American English speakers imitated a Glaswegian (Scottish) English speaker. The target sounds were /t/ and /r/, as the Glaswegian speaker aspirated wordmedial /t/ but pronounced /r/ as a flap initially and medially. This experiment therefore explored whether speakers could learn to reassign a sound they already produce (the flap) to a different phoneme and to different phonetic contexts. Speakers appeared to learn systematically, as they could generalize to words which they had never heard the Glaswegian pronounce. There was a mix of categorical learning, with the allophone simply switching to a different use, and parametric approximations of the “new” sound. The phonetic context was clearly important, as flaps were produced less successfully when word-initial. And although there was variety in success rates, most speakers learned to produce a flap for /r/ at least some of the time and retained this learning over a week’s time. These effects are most easily explained in a hybrid of neo-generative and exemplar models of speech perception and production.